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SilverStone Treasure TS01 RFID Enclosure

09-01-2008, 04:00 AM

Phoronix: SilverStone Treasure TS01 RFID Enclosure

Over the years SilverStone has designed some astonishing ATX computer cases such as the Temjin TJ10 and the Sugo, but they haven't stopped with cases. SilverStone has introduced high-performance power supplies such as the Decathlon 800W and they have also been making disk drive enclosures such as the MS05, which is an eSATA-based enclosure. SilverStone though has introduced a new 2.5" disk enclosure that combines a normal USB to SATA adapter with RFID encryption technologies. If the included RFID sensor keys aren't close enough to this enclosure, the user cannot access any data off the disk as it's all encrypted. However, does the SilverStone Treasure TS01 work under Linux? We'll tell you today.

I just wanted to point out that this article may be a bit misleading. Here's why:

After doing some reading on these types of drives I learned that INNMAX IM7206 is a common SATA bridge with RFID built in. It turns out the SilverStone TS01 uses this chipset to do its so-called "encryption." Accoring to a Heise Security report, this chipset is dishonestly advertised as doing 128-bit hardware AES enc/decryption. The truth of the matter is that the IM7206 chipset is simply applying a 512-byte cypher block as a XOR to each sector of the drive. As the report points out, this is extremely easy to break.

So the only place where AES encryption is used is in saving the RFID chip's ID in the controller's memory. That is to say, the drive itself is NOT encrypted using 128-bit AES. Quite disappointing if you ask me. More importantly, not safe at all.

Heise Security lists the TS01 as one of the external enclosures carrying this chipset.